Chick-Fil-A Uses Real Eggs — But There's A Catch

While Chick-fil-A is mostly known for its lunch and dinner chicken options, the chain does indeed sell breakfast sandwiches and breakfast bowls. Some sandwiches simply feature a fried chicken filet on a biscuit, but others have your more standard build consisting of a folded egg, a protein, and cheese on either a biscuit or an English muffin. Having an egg is good and all, but something you may want to note is that the egg at Chick-fil-A isn't exactly what it seems. Yes, there are real eggs in it, but it has a lot of additional ingredients included that aren't straight from the chicken.

The ingredients list for Chick-fil-A's folded egg does in fact start with eggs, according to the fast food chain's website, but after that things start changing quite a bit. Water is added to them along with a butter flavoring, xanthan gum (which is a thickener), various oils, an emulsifier in the form of soy lecithin, and some colorings, such as annatto and beta carotene. Soy lecithin is one of those additives you'll commonly see included with processed food ingredients, though oftentimes so little of it is used that it wouldn't even trigger a soy allergy (don't mistake this for medical advice). In this case, a scrambled egg isn't necessarily just a scrambled egg.

The first chain that comes to mind when it comes to drive-thru breakfast is undoubtedly McDonald's. A quick comparison of its folded egg's ingredients (when reviewed directly on its website) reveals a much shorter ingredients list. The list is only five components long: eggs, nonfat milk, a form of starch, salt, and citric acid. There's nothing terribly out of place here, as starch is sometimes used in scrambled-style egg recipes in order to give the dish a bit of a custardy texture and extra structure.

If you want to go even simpler, however, McDonald's round egg, which is found on its English muffin sandwiches, merely contains a single, freshly cracked egg. You can also request the folded egg to be substituted with a round egg if you like by using that option in the app or kiosk or simply asking in person. (I do it all the time, and frankly, I think it tastes way better.) That being said, this isn't exactly an apples-to-apples comparison since McDonald's and Chick-fil-A specialize in totally different options. In any case, it's always good to know what's in your food, because sometimes an egg isn't just an ordinary egg.